Homeschool Resouces: The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading

This week, I am going to discuss a very controversial topic: reading!  There are lots of people out there who have very strong opinions about how to teach a child to read.  I am not one of them.  When I started noticing signs of reading readiness in Mary, I started asking just about every homeschooling mom I knew what program they used.  Do you want to know what I discovered?  Every single person I asked used a different program.  To confuse matters even more, every single one of those moms successfully taught her children to read.  That really impressed upon me that there was no "best" reading program out there.  If there was, certainly every mom would be using it!  I had to find the best fit for Mary and me.  I chose to use The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading because of its recommendation in The Well-Trained Mind.  Incidentally, I chose this book even though NONE of those moms that I polled had used it!

Honestly, I really liked the title: The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading.  That was me: an ordinary parent (at best)!  And that's what I wanted to do: teach my child to read.  The premise of the book is just that: parents can teach their children to read.  You do not need a special degree or training to teach your child how to read.  Another distinct emphasis of this book is that you can teach your child to read before she can write.  I started this program with Mary before her third birthday even!  (I probably won't start so young with all my children, but Mary had learned all her letters and their sounds and was really interested in reading, so I ran with it!)

The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading is an explicit phonics program, which means that "the basic sounds of letters are taught systematically and then blended into words."  There are a total of 231 lessons, beginning with vowels and consonants.  By the end, the student will read words with seven syllables!  In between the student learns blends, digraphs, silent letters and much, much more.

Since Mary couldn't write when we were using this book, I also purchased magnetic letter tiles.  After I taught a lesson, I would ask Mary to use the letter tiles to form words from the lesson, sounding out each letter as she did so.  This really helped to reinforce the lesson.  We also enjoyed the review games that are interspersed throughout.

The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading really worked well for Mary and me.  At age five, she still loves books, so much so that I actually have to restrict her reading time so that she can get other schoolwork done!  Recently, I have begun to use this program with Maggie also.  She has done really well with it so far and has learned all her vowels and consonants and their sounds.  We are continuing to play games to review the vowels and consonants before moving on with lesson 27 and reading short-vowel words.  I think this program is great for children who show early signs of reading readiness and are really interested in reading.  I definitely would be careful not to push a young child to read if she was not interested, though.  Doing that could cause a child to loathe reading!